In case you missed, the Florida Gators won the national championship last night, becoming the first team all year to beat the Houston Cougars without breaking 70 points. The victory was a massive endorsement for 39-year old coach Todd Golden, an Arizona native, and his unusual manner of building a championship team.
From that win, there are several lessons that Arizona State's Bobby Hurley could apply to his own program as he enters his 11th season in Tempe.
Lesson #1: Scouting over consensus recruiting
Hurley has consistently enjoyed success on the recruiting trail, landing coveted 4-star players like Marcus Bagley, Taeshon Cherry, Sam Cunliffe, Josh Christopher, Enoch Boakye, and Luguentz Dort.
Last year, Hurley outdid himself, landing commits from 5-stars in Joson Sanon and Jayden Quaintance, giving Arizona State the 7th best recruiting class in the nation. The result was the Sun Devils' worst season of the Hurley era.
As good as Hurley's recruiting has been, on paper, the coach has fallen prey to recruiting by consensus rather than through scouting prowess. He has great recruiting classes because he goes after highly rated prospects, but they aren't necessarily a fit for what Hurley wants to do.
Golden, on the other hand, specifically avoided this practice at Florida. In fact, he has yet to land a 5-star recruit and has never had a recruiting class rank higher than 31st in the nation, with his most recent class placing 61st.
Florida is the first team in the modern era to win the National Championship without a top-100 recruit on the roster.
— Isaac Trotter (@Isaac__Trotter) April 8, 2025
Rather than go hunting for stars, Golden found players that fit into what he was doing. He brought in hard-working, unselfish glue guys like Denzel Aberdeen, Thomas Haugh, and Alex Condon - the latter of whom made the game-winning hustle play Monday night - all of whom were 3-star recruits.
Golden also made shrewd, under-the-radar additions from the portal. Walter Clayton Jr., the Gators' three-point merchant, was once a 0-star recruit who got a shot at Iona. After winning his conference's Player of the Year award, Clayton entered the portal but was still only the 15th-ranked transfer. It's a similar story for Will Richard, who transferred from Belmont after having previously been a low 3-star prospect.
Golden understood how each of these players would fit alongside each other, largely thanks to an embrace of data integration into the program's scouting processes, and he pooled all these underrated talents together to build a superteam that nobody saw coming.
Lesson #2: Data-driven schemes
Speaking of data, it reigns supreme in Gainesville. Golden is a devout believer in analytics, and even has an analytics coach: Jonathan Safir, who followed Golden from San Francisco to Florida. Safir recently spoke on the all-encompassing role that analytics plays in running his program:
"It’s just of the backbone of everything we do whether it’s player evaluation identification, retention, recruiting. To coaching with our hustle stats, and the analytics we look for in our shot selection, our game play, or our in-game management."
The way that Golden builds and implements his schemes are reverse-engineered around finding the most high percentage shots on the court. That means three-pointers (hello, Walter Clayton Jr.) and shots around the rim.
Defensively, Golden built his scheme around preventing opponents from getting those same types of shots. He sought out rim protectors and backcourt players who can close out effectively on the arc, which proved to be paramount in the final seconds against Houston.
The biggest knock on Hurley's tenure in Tempe has been exactly this: scheme.
At times, it seems as if Arizona State has no clear identity on offense. The Sun Devils will all too often lack tempo and motion, devolving into iso ball that ends with someone jacking up an ill-advised shot late into the shot clock.
Having a core philosophy around which to build your schemes, as Golden did with Florida, would go a long way towards rejuvenating this program.
Lesson #3: Team cohesion over big names
Arizona State has lost almost their entire roster to the transfer portal this year, which is a reflection of the state of the program going into Hurley's 11th season. However, it's become fairly routine for Arizona State to see large amounts of roster turnover in the Hurley era.
Under Hurley, Arizona State has often held the belief that player retention is too much of an uphill battle, especially given Hurley's track record for landing highly rated players both out of high school and in the transfer portal.
In Gainesville, Golden took the exact opposite approach. His roster building philosophy was built on player retention and development, neither of which have been core tenets for Hurley.
Clayton Jr., Haugh, and Condon all joined two years ago. Aberdeen and Will Richard came before them. Of the Gators' major players this year, only Alijah Martin and Reuben Chinyelu were in their first year with the program, though both came through the transfer portal.
No freshmen played major minutes for this team. Golden retained and developed his talent, building a roster of experience and poise that was primed for the biggest stage. He also resisted the urge to go out and add the biggest names available, even though he could have won those battles with Florida's NIL war chest.
By comparison, Hurley frequently builds his rosters out of big portal names and top freshmen that get thrown into the fire right away. As such, his teams routinely start off strong before wilting when they get to conference play; Arizona State has finished with a winning record in the conference in just three seasons under Hurley.
Golden's approach helped prepare his team, both mentally and physically, for the rigors of the tournament. Hurley, who has yet to advance past the first round of either the NCAA Tournament or even the College Basketball Crown, would be wise to adopt a similar model rather than rebuilding his roster from scratch every offseason.